Category Archive Browsing Category: What Pegman Saw

These days when you think fire-spotter, you probably imagine one of those birdcage houses up on stilts with windows on every wall. When I started we had none of that. You watched from a peak, scanning the valleys for smoke and trying to recall where the lightning struck yesterday or the day before, marking the…

Georg was bursting with his news, but kept the letter from America tucked in his pocket. This must be done properly, he thought, knowing Mother might not be as enthusiastic as she seemed when he’d told her his plans some months before. Father would be indifferent, as he was to everything except Schmutzi, the family…

Ras Alula strode between rows of painted warriors as they cheered and thumped their spears against their shields, many of these  bedecked with grisly trophies of the battle.Hands, mostly, though some of the younger men had adopted the American tradition of cutting scalps from the fallen enemy. Ras Alula did not care what they did…

Midway through the second pitch I can tell someting is wrong. He’s hesitating for some reason, hanging on his ice axe longer than necessary. Maybe this was a bad idea. We’d climbed together for almost a decade, traveling summers to all the climbing meccas. Joshua Tree, Pinncales, Black Canyon. When he and his then-girlfriend moved…

Gustav walked on, flecks of snow stinging his cheeks like spits of sand, the rhythmic crunch-crunch of his boots accompanying him like a funeral drum. Your novel, sir, is a mixture of genuine truth and private grouch, Strindberg had told him, but too much of the latter for them to consider publishing it. What now, he…

How long am I here? An eternity. There is no time but now, and now lasts forever. There must be hundreds in this place, though I never see anyone. I know from the screams that come through the walls. I see only the guards when they come for me.  Sometimes I am hooded and led to…

As always happens when a dictator falls, there were rumors that he had escaped. Conflicting reports of the exeution, confusing photographs, a lack of a gravesite. He had held us in his wicked grip for twenty-five years. Countless victims arrested and tortured, thousands shot or merely vanished, Romania turned to a nation of informers leaping…

I cruised the Lower Ninth in my rented Ford, first time back since Katrina. Everything was gone. When I found it at last, Jeffus sat high on his porch sipping julep from his big tin cup. House looked much the same, though the boards was new and the paint fresher. “How was your house spared…